Sweeping skylines, masses of people walking across busy streets and designers creating scale models of cities blend with images of overcrowded urban areas and street protests in the trailer for Gary Hustwit’s film Urbanized.

A free screening of this film will be hosted at Campus Cinema in Witherspoon on Sunday, April 15th , at 7 p.m ., followed by a Q&A with the director.

Urbanized is a documentary about the design of cities and how it shapes our everyday lives, Hustwit said.

“From the moment you step out your front door, your day is determined by the design of your city,” Hustwit said. “So I guess I wanted to explore the thinking and strategies behind urban design to get a better sense of how it affects my life and what I can do to help shape the city I live in for the better.”

Hustwit said inspiration for the film also came from wanting to look at and spread ideas about innovative design projects in other cities.

“There are also so many challenges that are facing cities around the world, and many of those challenges are being addressed through design,” Hustwit said.

The director’s presence on Sunday originates from the collaboration between the film studies program at N.C . State and the Full Frame Documentary Festival based in Durham.

“We have been partnering with them for many years now,” Marsha Orgeron, director of film studies, said.

Every year the film studies program sends a group of N.C. State student fellows to Full Frame. Once there, they are allowed to participate in special sessions with filmmakers and go to smaller panels, along with the regular screenings.

About 100 documentary films will be featured over the course of four days and six theaters. Last year alone, Full Frame distributed about 28,000 tickets, Sadie Tillery, director of programming for Full Frame, said.

As part of the University’s relationship with this festival, filmmakers who are affiliated with Full Frame are invited to bring their film on campus and discuss it.

In 2007, Laura Poitras was one such director who came to talk about and screen her Academy award nominee film My Country, My Country.

According to Orgeron, Hustwit participated in the fellows program before as a panelist at Full Frame.

“Most filmmakers are really excited to get their work in front of college students,” Tillery said.

Hustwit’s film to be screened in Witherspoon is the latest in his design-oriented trilogy, proceeding Helvetica (2007) and Objectified (2009).

“Both [Helvetica and Objectified] are very, very interesting,” Orgeron said. “They’re slick, they’re well done, they’re engaging, they’re entertaining. I mean Helvetica is about a font and it has the potential to be completely uninteresting, but it’s a totally fascinating film.”

Hustwit doesn’t produce his documentaries through the traditional avenues of investors, however.

Along with his own personal money, Kickstarter is an online site he uses to raise funds from the public to create his films.

“Literally, you just say, ‘Look, I need 10 or 20 or however many thousands of dollars, and if you donate at this level you’ll get a T-shirt and a DVD when the film comes out. If you donate at this level, you get your name in the credits,'” Orgeron said. “So it allows you to not have any other ties and obligations beyond basically a support group that can make donations.”

The cost of a documentary isn’t a lot and can be paid in stages over the course of the project, as well, Hustwit said.

His advice for students:

“If you have a great concept for a film, the money will find you. Don’t obsess over the funding or the equipment, obsess over the concept.”

“I think he’s an incredible inspiration for students, in terms of how you can think about really pursuing a career in filmmaking completely independently,” Orgeron said.

Looking past the upcoming N.C. State screening of Urbanized, Hustwit has other plans in the making.

“I have dozens of film ideas, for both documentary and fiction films,” Hustwit said. “I’m planning on starting a few new film projects this summer, but I’m not sure which ones they’ll be yet. I’m also collaborating with another photographer on a book project that we’ll announce later this month.”